Legendary designer Dieter Rams thinks we’re buying too much stuff

On a weeknight at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the celebrated German industrial designer Dieter Rams ambled up to a podium in his uniform of a black shirt, thinning silver bowl cut, and cane. He was there to introduce a movie, of which he is begrudgingly but indisputably the star.

“The film has my name, but it’s less about me, and more about my chief concerns,” the 86-year-old said with characteristic self-effacing charm.

Rams, who is famous for his clean-lined designs for home goods companies like Braun and Vitsoe, has many concerns—the state of the world, the state of design, the way our appetite for shiny, new things is leading us down a gluttonous path of destruction—and he voices all of them in the new documentary “Rams.”

The film is the newest from Gary Hustwit, who serves as the design world’s de facto documentarian having made the lauded “Urbanized,” “Objectified,” and “Helvetica.”

Unlike Hustwit’s other films, which center around concepts, theories, and ideas, “Rams” is very much a portrait of a person, despite its subject’s protestations.